


The Hill and the Tree

by whichstiel



Series: Season 12 Codas [21]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curses, Episode Tag, Episode: s12e20 Twigs and Twine and Tasha Banes, Fairy Tales, Gen, Magic, Season/Series 12, ancient gods, cursed magic, episode coda, spn 12x20, twigs twine & tasha banes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 18:52:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10837287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: “Stay in the car,” Max says, pulling out his gun and checking to make sure it is loaded. “There’ve been disappearances in these woods every five years for the last…god knows how long. Whatever’s back there, it’s old.”“All the more reason I should go with you.” Alicia curls one tense hand on the back of the car seat and has to actively resist digging her nails into the upholstery until she cuts through to stuffing. Max stares at her for a moment, his eyes full of something she cannot name. A hook buried deep within her gut tugs when he says once more, very softly, “Stay in the car, Alicia. I’m just going to take a few readings. I will be back soon. I promise.”Alicia stays in the car.





	The Hill and the Tree

**Author's Note:**

> This last episode was a fairy tale, right? Right.

There is a place in the northern forest along an ancient continental spine where the hills are too old to be called mountains, though mountains they once were.

The hills roll steeply, sleepily, under a vast blanket of forest. People have lived in these hills for centuries upon centuries and their mark is unmistakable. Footpaths and roads slice the terrain and bent trees show ancient avenues. Yet even now there is a hill unmarked by trails, even those made by animals. For every living creature, from deer down to the smallest vole, avoids this hill.

That is, the hill remains unmarked by paths most of the time. Every five years in the earliest breath of spring, a trail opens into the glade and leads up onto the hill.

Those who stumble across the trail do so by accident. One wrong turn here, one obscured path there, and they find themselves on a wide dirt trail, well packed and sun dappled. Wildflowers, too early or too late to properly belong to the season dot the sides of the path at first. Inspired, the visitors to the hill often stop to adorn themselves, weaving flowers into their hair and tucking the sweet smelling blooms into their clothing.

The woods are silent. No birds sing here. But the hikers will themselves sing, filling the space of the birds, becoming the voice of the forest. They rejoice, though the occasion is unclear.

The hill is glorious, green and lush. Water trickles like blood from seeps in the cliffs of stone that pen in the trail, sending rivulets alongside the path or down the hill to disappear in the underbrush. Inevitably, visitors reach a clearing.

In the clearing there is a cottage. The cottage appears careworn, with roughly hewn logs forming the walls and poorly thatched rushes sheltering the inhabitants from the weather. Moss grows thickly on it, so it almost appears as a boil risen up from the land itself, until visitors get close enough to make out the door slashed into the side of the cottage, at the end of the trail.

The visitors enter the cottage. Nobody has ever come back out. And in a day or two the path will disappear, reclaimed by the woods for another five year slumber. The hill has taken mankind’s offerings since it was an ancient gray crag. It will drink mankind’s blood when the hill has worn away into plains. It will swallow mankind even when it falls into the sea. The hill is a god and it is patient.

***

“Stay in the car,” Max says, pulling out his gun and checking to make sure it is loaded. “There’ve been disappearances in these woods every five years for the last…god knows how long. Whatever’s back there, it’s old.”

“All the more reason I should go with you.” Alicia curls one tense hand on the back of the car seat and has to actively resist digging her nails into the upholstery until she cuts through to stuffing. Max stares at her for a moment, his eyes full of something she cannot name. A hook buried deep within her gut tugs when he says once more, very softly, “Stay in the car, Alicia. I’m just going to take a few readings. I will be back soon. I promise.”

Alicia stays in the car.

Sunlight and shade pass over the dash as the hours march relentlessly past. Alicia tries to distract herself with her phone. She pulls out a book, then another, and another, setting each aside. Where is Max? Part of her desperately yearns to leave the car. She used to be a fighter. When did she stop fighting? How has her role devolved so quickly into research only, far from danger, far from the sharp teeth of the world?

She rests her head back on the seat, and rolls her neck with a loud crack. She’s been still for so long. Boredom burrows in like a worm. “I don’t know what you’re trying to get a read on, Max,” she mutters. “I don’t know… I don’t know much about anything you do these days.” Her sigh fills the car like a hurricane. “What happened? We used to be so close.” And now Max is a shadow, with shadowed eyes and shadowed smiles and shadowed secrets. Still he is her brother. And she listens to him, right? Yes, that's right. _I’m his sister,_ she thinks, _and he helps me make choices in the world._ Still, she used to know his thoughts, their twin connection almost like a magic cord between them, stretching from birth onwards. Now she hears nothing from him, like he isn’t here anymore. Or she isn’t.

Still, obedience sits in her gut like a drug and reluctantly she picks up a book again as morning marches into afternoon. When the connection breaks between herself and Max it twangs along her entire body with the force of an ax struck into a tree. Free will, at once familiar and strange, burns within her.

Alicia comes to herself doubled over the dash, clenching the plastic surface like it's a life preserver in the ocean. She gasps and blinks furiously for a moment until her eyes can focus again. She looks up. Evening blushes across the sky and she is still alone in the car. Alicia slams her hands on the dash. “Why the fuck am I still sitting in the car? Fuck! Max,” she says angrily, “I don’t know where the fuck you are but I’m on my way, okay? I’m on my way to find you.”

The tether that makes her agreeable, makes her assent to Max’s guidance, is gone. But that twin umbilical connection...it's still there. It leads her straight into the woods. She navigates the twisting paths like a fish on a line and tries to understand…everything. Flashes of the past six years come to her as she walks and the visions are so clear, so jarring, it feels like it’s her first time experiencing these memories.

_Max sends her to the library, coming to get her late at night with a bloodied face. “There was no time to get you,” he explains. “I’m sorry. Please be okay with this." And she is._

_The mauled body of a victim they failed to save lies before Alicia. Tears run from her eyes like sap until Max claps her on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Alicia. We saved most of them.” Joy suffuses her then and she leaves the bodies to Max, walks outside, and worships the sun until he's ready to go._

_She has insomnia, sitting up well into the night - night after night - until Max whispers, “Sleep.”_

_An earlier memory...her arm, broken in one moment, straight in another. Max’s tears as he explains. “It’s okay. It’s all okay. It was just a sprain. You're fine. You're fine.”_

_Max, driving away from the quiet bed and breakfast, their mother’s pyre still smoldering behind them. “Don’t look,” Max tells her. And she doesn’t._

And then before that… Before that…

Alicia shakes her head. What happened? The memory lies just out of reach. And then Alicia reaches the path at the edge of the hill. A familiar numbness seeps into her mind and she follows the hook and line in her gut up the hill and into the trees.

When Alicia arrives at the cottage she can tell Max is alive inside, though the tether between them is thin. She opens the door and walks inside. It’s larger than it looked on the outside and deeper, more like a burrow than a cottage. Max lies spread eagle on the dirt floor in a circle of stones.

“Max!” Alicia cries and crosses the stone circle without thought, coming to rest by his still side. In the darkness something chuckles. Or maybe the darkness chuckles. She stands up, defiant. “Let him go,” she says, her voice like a blade.

“No,” the moss says, simply.

“Let him go or I’ll—”

“Oh, what will you do to me?” The roof asks in curious delight. “Kill me?”

“Yes,” Alicia says, though her knees are starting to feel weak.

The wooden walls laugh at her. The floor says, “No mortal nor immortal may slay me. I am the god of the mountain.”

“Oh yeah?” Alicia says. “Try me.” She steps from the stone circle and draws her gun and her knife. “Everything has a brain, and I will find yours. Mark my words.”

The room is silent for a moment. “What are you?” it whispers. “What are you what are you what are you what are you.”

The question washes over her and Alicia waits for the answer. _What is she, indeed?_

And then the cottage laughs lightly once more. “Oh, I see! A clever puppet. Oh this is too adorable. Too funny. The little mage has brought along a toy. Well, this is easily fixed.” Max sits up suddenly in the middle of the circle and his eyes fly open. Desperately, he seeks Alicia’s gaze. She thinks he mouths something to her and then he’s slipping off a ring from his finger, a ring she’s never noticed before (or has she?) and something in her snaps as he sets it onto a finger of earth. The umbilical tether to her brother breaks and the darkness, and the dirt, and the moss, and the rushes take her instead.

When Alicia comes to herself she’s higher up the hill, the cottage nowhere in sight. She will follow this path, this path to a cliff. She will follow this path into the air, and down to the ground. The ground will eat her whole, press her close, keep her safe in its embrace.

“Little tree child,” the woods whisper to her. “Welcome home.”

Alicia follows the path.

Her toes shuffle at the edge of the sky at the end of the path. The line drew her here sure and strong. And then something tugs at her spine. It’s a hook and line and it tugs at her spine. It rips at her spine. Alicia wails in agony as it pulls harder and harder until something inside of her snaps like a twig bundle struck across a knee.

She falls to her knees and gasps against the rock. “My god,” she says. “I have been a puppet.” The memories finally, finally return. She remembers the press of her own corpse against her back in a quiet bedroom in the bed and breakfast six years ago. Alicia stands with difficulty. Every part of her being shrieks in agony. “Max,” she moans. “What did you do?”

She finds her way back through the woods, trees and bushes and rocks scrambling out of her way. Alicia walks straight down the mountain, past the cabin, past the field, past the rushing waters. She walks to a cave hidden on the side of the hill that was once a mountain. It’s narrow, but she presses herself into it like a knife blade.

The stone begins to howl once she enters the cavern. It should be deafening. But she's a puppet whose strings have been cut and she presses on, unperturbed. In the cavern is a nest of rock and in the nest, a thick green worm lies sluggishly upon its bed. “I have the ring,” the hill gasps. “I control you! I forbid you from this place! Begone and destroy yourself.”

“Time is a loop,” she tells it. “And I am both and neither - mortal and immortal. And now I have the heart of you.” Calmly, she pulls the blade from her belt. Calmly, she steps into the nest. Calmly, with care to break every last of its ties to the world, she slices the green thing to ribbons.

When she is done, the woods part for Alicia once again and lead her to the cabin rising in the field like a boil. Alicia walks inside and picks up the slack body of her brother. With one hand she shuffles through the dirt until she pulls out a ring, black stone glinting darker than the night. Alicia slips it on and at last she understands everything.

Alicia smiles as she walks down the hill, her brother’s light breath fogging the air. “The contract for your soul is broken, brother. It was broken when you gave up the ring. And now the ring is mine.” She turns her chin towards the sky. “I am neither mortal nor immortal. Neither wood nor woman. And if I have to walk this Earth until the fiery end, I swear I will bring this cursed gift into the light and make it good once again.” The woods murmur at this and she feels word passing of her rising - spread among the trees through the wind across the spine of the continent.

**Author's Note:**

> Aw yeah. Wrote this in an hour on the treadmill at the gym this morning. Multi-tasking ftw!
> 
> Who else was super creeped out by Max's control over his sister at the end there? Gross. Fanfiction to the rescue!
> 
> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/whichstiel) and [Tumblr](http://whichstiel.tumblr.com/) @ whichstiel. You may also like the Supernatural recap and gif blog I co-write/curate, [Shirtless Sammy](https://shirtlesssammy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
